Thanks for the comment. I did go through your post and your findings are very interesting. There has been a growing concern among SEO practitioners that the Google tool may sometimes be not the most accurate and/or they are withholding information.

As I mentioned, it is best to use a combination of tools and not rely too heavily on one, since you cannot be sure one tool is always accurate.

By the way; have you actually tried contacting Google support with your findings. I would be curious to see if they reply and what they say

Now, for the purposes of full scale keyword research, one cannot use Google Insights or Trends, because those are quick tools that are relevant to the combination of the keywords searched, and the volume numbers will change depending on which keywords are used, but it is definitely interesting that they can display different relationships between keywords than the Google Adwords Tool.

That just leads me to believe that perhaps you did not fix the cause of the penalty. Here is a video from Google's Webmaster Help where they explain few things about reconsideration submission: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G959-2RlPyA

There is no easy answer to this. It all depends on your line of business and your budget. If you're a business that sells sneakers a domain like sneakers.com would probably be a goldmine, but you probably won't be able to buy it, unless you're a huge company.

If you're just starting out with a new domain name, then don't expect any great SEO results for 6 months to 1 year. But that's why you can still use paid search, and other advertisement techniques alongside SEO.